tretle
March 26th, 2008, 07:34 PM
All in all I like the look of Ubuntu hardy. There are some things which I think need some polishing though. The new desktop wallpaper looks great in my opinion but the default window decoration looks tacky.
The wallpaper looks satiny smooth and professional.
The default theme has moved over to the murrine engine which tries to get a more coherent smooth interface rather than the bubbly clearlooks engine.
There are some problems with this though. The murrine engine would definitely give application developers more freedom in creating a beautiful application through simplicity of the interface but it just doesn't work 100% with the usability design of Ubuntu right now.
Apple use a similar simplistic gtk engine and it works but why?
They don't have the file/edit/view/ etc options sprawled along the top of every application so they also don't have a huge out of place line stretching along the top.
I'm not asking for a core change in the way we handle these options in Ubuntu. I would like to see some more work done on making sure design flaws like this don't happen in the future.
So the window decoration is still going for the bubbly effect even though the rest of the gtk theme is going for a flattened effect.
To get things looking allot nicer all you needed to do was change the decoration to inverted. The screen shot below demonstrates the difference between both window decorations and its obvious which one fits in with the theme more.
Inverted:
[img=http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/6307/screenshotuf1.th.png] (http://img207.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshotuf1.png)
Original:
[img=http://img395.imageshack.us/img395/8162/screenshot1qu4.th.png] (http://img395.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot1qu4.png)
Right last thing, I think there should be some kind of standardization put in place for the icon theming in the notification tray. Apple have done a great job at this with simplistic icons which do not take away from the theming of the desktop.
The standardized theme should not be based on the icon themes for the network manager and sound controller. Although they have taken a good step with making them unobtrusive by giving them a basic two part color scheme they are still too detailed which just makes them look ugly.
The wallpaper looks satiny smooth and professional.
The default theme has moved over to the murrine engine which tries to get a more coherent smooth interface rather than the bubbly clearlooks engine.
There are some problems with this though. The murrine engine would definitely give application developers more freedom in creating a beautiful application through simplicity of the interface but it just doesn't work 100% with the usability design of Ubuntu right now.
Apple use a similar simplistic gtk engine and it works but why?
They don't have the file/edit/view/ etc options sprawled along the top of every application so they also don't have a huge out of place line stretching along the top.
I'm not asking for a core change in the way we handle these options in Ubuntu. I would like to see some more work done on making sure design flaws like this don't happen in the future.
So the window decoration is still going for the bubbly effect even though the rest of the gtk theme is going for a flattened effect.
To get things looking allot nicer all you needed to do was change the decoration to inverted. The screen shot below demonstrates the difference between both window decorations and its obvious which one fits in with the theme more.
Inverted:
[img=http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/6307/screenshotuf1.th.png] (http://img207.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshotuf1.png)
Original:
[img=http://img395.imageshack.us/img395/8162/screenshot1qu4.th.png] (http://img395.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot1qu4.png)
Right last thing, I think there should be some kind of standardization put in place for the icon theming in the notification tray. Apple have done a great job at this with simplistic icons which do not take away from the theming of the desktop.
The standardized theme should not be based on the icon themes for the network manager and sound controller. Although they have taken a good step with making them unobtrusive by giving them a basic two part color scheme they are still too detailed which just makes them look ugly.